The Pulsar Files, page 7
part #1 of Matt Flynn Series
‘Yes!’ Rosie said punching the air. ‘I thought it would.’
‘Does this mean he shot down the balloon with the Andersons inside? All the information we’ve had from the Oxfordshire police says it was a slam-dunk accident.’
‘It’s not conclusive, but I can’t think of another good reason why someone like him would be there, there’s nothing to see but electricity pylons and empty fields.’
‘It sounds like it was him to me, the bastard. I hope you nail him.’
‘There’s not much chance of that happening now as we’ve handed him over to Interpol.’
‘At least he’s not hightailed it back to Serbia. If he went there, we’d never get him.’
‘Even if he went back to Serbia, I’m not sure we would try to extradite him. He’s just a foot soldier carrying out an order. I’m more interested in trying to find the name of the people who hired him.’
‘Good luck finding them.’
She made to walk away.
‘Before you go,’ Siki said, ‘I have something else for you.’
He handed her a sheaf of papers.
‘What’s this?’ she said, flicking through the first few pages.
‘The financials of Kevin and Stephen Anderson’s defence business, Galleon Electronics. There’s also some personal stuff relating to Kevin. I recommend you take a look at the personal stuff first. It makes interesting reading.’
She walked back to her desk, put her papers down and headed towards the kitchen. The Director, never one to ask someone to do something he could do himself, was in there making coffee.
She shuffled her feet, not wanting to surprise him and cause an accident. ‘Afternoon Gill,’ she said.
He turned. ‘Afternoon Rosie.’
‘Would you like a coffee?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll make it myself.’
‘Allow me.’
‘Thank you.’
‘How are you getting on tracking the handiwork of our Serb shooter?’
‘I feel at last we’re making some progress.’ She went on to explain about the DNA match of the cigarette butt, linking the Serb with the balloon crash site and the lack of a major incident in the Oxfordshire area except this one.
‘Damn! We had the swine in custody only a few days ago and if I had this I could’ve stuck a couple of fingers up at Interpol.’
She shrugged. ‘These things happen. They’ll hang some serious charges on him, I’m sure.’
‘Maybe they will and maybe they won’t, as Katić has a nasty habit of wriggling his way out of situations like this. We didn’t have enough evidence at the time to hold him, but hindsight’s a wonderful mistress, is she not?’
‘I agree.’
He handed Rosie her coffee, lifted his own and walked out of the kitchen without saying another word, although she did hear ‘damn’ uttered a couple of times.
Rosie headed back to her desk, sat down and picked up the research left there a few minutes ago. She spread Kevin Anderson’s personal bank account statements out in front of her. Without using a calculator, or expending too much brainpower, she understood what Sikandar had been alluding to. Kevin’s salary hit the credit column every month with the monotony of a dripping tap, as did a host of household bills on the opposite side.
A number of large withdrawals stood out: several thousands over many months. To her, it suggested either the payment for a number of big ticket-items such as stock market investments or payments to builders, or something nefarious like a serious drug habit or the activities of a heavy gambler.
She sat back sucking the end of her pen. Drug users and gamblers often needed large sums of money in a hurry, making her think this might be pointing to a reason why Kevin would try and murder his brother. Perhaps he did it to hide his addiction, to receive a large insurance pay-out to clear his debts, or, now being in control of the business, so he could milk it for all it’s worth.
Chapter 13
He called the meeting to order before glancing through the minutes of the last one. Kevin Anderson was chairing the Weekly Supervisor’s Meeting whose purpose, according to his dead brother, Stephen, was to foster good communication among supervisors and managers and allow them to highlight issues before they turned into problems. In his experience, it was an opportunity for some of the old gas-bags to take time out from working and blow some hot air. For the rest of them, a chance to blame another department for their shortcomings and failures.
‘I can’t find anything contentious in the minutes of the last meeting,’ Kevin said, ‘do we all accept them?’ He scanned the faces of the other ten people gathered around the long table in the conference room, wondering if anyone would be foolish enough to get into his bad books so early in his reign by challenging him.
‘When Stephen was in the chair,’ Circuit Production Manager Ed Waters said, ‘he always went through the previous minutes item by item, to remind us what was discussed last time.’ He spoke with a broad West Country accent making him sound thicker than he was.
‘Ed, I’m running the show now and I don’t want to waste time talking about stuff we did or didn’t do, but about the things we are going to do, okay?’ The big man was about to open his gob and say something else but before he did, Kevin said with some enthusiasm, ‘Right, what’s the first item on today’s agenda?’
After fifteen minutes, he was getting bored with their inter-department rivalries and petty bickering and try as he may, he couldn’t maintain his concentration. In his role as Sales Director, he was supposed to attend this and several other meetings Stephen organised in a never-ending quest to keep everyone focussed. With him being out on the road most of the time, he had a ready-made excuse to avoid attending.
Back then, Kevin was jealous of his brother, issuing orders and sitting in a large, warm office and not being stuck in another traffic jam and eating his lunch out of a Tupperware box. Now with his name on the main office door, ambition curdled in his mouth like week-old milk, made worse with every staff meeting, the succession of banal visitors and having to listen to every supervisors’ personal problems.
The police had now released the bodies of Stephen, Julia, Sophia and Ben and their funerals were scheduled to take place the following week. He encouraged Chris to contact the family solicitor and to obtain a copy of his parents’ will. If, as expected, Stephen’s share of the business was left to Chris, his nephew had a decision to make, but Kevin couldn’t see a place for him here at Galleon Electronics.
Chris’s degree, if ever completed, was in Computer Science. Their IT department wasn’t big and he couldn’t sack the IT Manager who had been with the company eight years, even though at times he’d like to. If Chris gained some work experience before joining the company, it would make him more employable, but it wouldn’t solve Kevin’s immediate problem; he wanted his old Sales Director job back.
The meeting finished and many trooped out with more on their plates than when they came in, the way he intended to run meetings from now on. He returned to his office and ate lunch at his desk. There was a good canteen on the premises, serving hot meals, pasta and salads but to his mind the peace of the office was still a novelty and a welcome change from greasy service station food or a plastic-tasting sandwich eaten in a noisy lay-by.
At six-thirty he left the building and drove to a pub called The Corridor on the corner of Cowley Road and Princes Street. He ordered a pint of lager and took a seat at the back, away from the window. He used pubs around the city to meet contacts, entertain customers and talk shop with other people from the industry, but tonight it was personal and he didn’t want to be spotted, especially with so many reporters still sniffing around after the accident.
If meeting his buyer of scrap metal, it would be at one of the big pubs down by the river or in town. Big Ted liked to eye up the students in their tight jeans and skimpy t-shirts. Anderson enjoyed looking at the girls too but he also liked having plenty of people about if things turned ugly. So far, Ted had been as gentle as a pussycat, but he knew enough of his violent reputation and his predilection for maiming opponents who didn’t give him what he wanted not to let his guard down.
The scrap belonged to Galleon and several of their customers, companies good at making the products they sold, but clueless about how much they threw out. Big Ted and his brothers operated a small foundry at the back of the engineering business they ran in Cowley. There, they extracted nickel, copper and iridium from damaged circuit boards, faulty wiring and end-cut pipes, and paid him a tidy sum for his trouble.
To date, the scrap money funded his gambling habits and shielded them from the prying eyes of Mrs A, but the money was declining on account of new equipment being installed by Galleon and their customers to generate less waste. Instead of scaling back his gambling to match the income shortfall, he’d been dipping into his salary to fund the difference.
Thinking of Big Ted, reminded him of a question Chris had asked him a few days back: did he know of anyone connected to the business who had the means to bring down the balloon? Kevin’s first reaction was to believe his nephew had gone loopy, as everyone, the police, reporters, and the Air Accident Investigation Branch concluded it had been an accident. To humour him, he said he’d take a look.
He didn’t need to look far as Galleon Electronics operated in the defence business, their products sold to military organisations or contractors staffed by ex-military types, some of whom kept weapons at home and referred to the general public as ‘civilians’.
On the non-military side, their biggest customer was Chess Electronics, a manufacturer of satellite navigation devices and satellite phones. The company’s owner, a former Stepney market trader, had been pictured in newspapers talking and laughing with some heavyweight criminals, despite the veneer of a gated Essex mansion and fifty-foot yacht.
On the scrap side, Big Ted ran an engineering and metal bashing business with his three brothers, any one of whom might be called ‘big’, except Ted was the largest and meanest of the lot. Ted’s other scrap contact, Terry Dennison, owned a car dealership at Woodstock and not only did Big Ted buy scrap metal from him, they were also involved in an insurance scam involving crashed cars, Dennison acting as an agent for dodgy lawyers looking for whiplash victims.
On the personal front, something never to be revealed to Chris, Kevin liked gambling. He needed to gamble. It was the thing that got him out of bed in the morning and was the reason, as Sales Director, he would drive sixty-thousand miles a year, or now, sit behind a desk all day and listen to crap. He often attended race meetings when Stephen believed he was talking to customers, and visited a casino in Oxford when his wife assumed he was working late.
In tandem with the drop in scrap income, his losses at the casino had risen. Nothing he couldn’t handle and for the moment, as boss of Galleon, he could award himself a salary hike, but the casino manager was starting to become twitchy and demanding he pay up. It was an ultimatum he couldn’t treat lightly as the Swift brothers owned the casino, the eldest of whom had been acquitted five years back for murdering a rival.
It was a toss-up which of the four groups, if any, might have been responsible for downing the balloon. They all possessed the capability, or knew someone who did, and none would lose much sleep over the result. Problem was, he couldn’t think of a good enough reason. A meeting with Big Ted was scheduled for the following week and while his watchword was always ‘careful,’ this time he would spend more time looking and listening to the man in front of him and less ogling the pretty girls.
He threw back the rest of his drink and stepped out from behind the table to buy another. It was then the door opened and she walked into the pub. She was wearing a clinging cotton top that emphasised her voluptuous breasts and a pleated skirt that did much to hide her great legs but nothing to disguise a delectable arse. She noticed him and walked over.
‘Hello gorgeous,’ she said as she wrapped her arms around him and gave him a warm, sloppy kiss. She eased back to look at him. ‘As you’re buying, make mine a gin and tonic.’
She started to move towards her seat but he held her tight, one arm around her waist and the other massaging her bottom. ‘Not so fast Lucinda, I was enjoying that.’
Chapter 14
‘Bravo Four calling Victor Lima One,’ DI Emma Davis said. ‘No sign of target vehicle. Repeat. No sign of target vehicle.’
‘You have such a posh radio voice,’ Jacko her driver said. ‘You should be reading the news or something, not swanning around in this heap of scrap looking for deadbeats.’
‘Is this the best chat-up line you can muster, Jack Harris? You need to do better or you’ll never meet your ideal woman.’
‘I rise when the challenge demands it.’
‘Don’t say something like that either or you’ll have them running for the door.’
‘Can we please change the subject before I dig myself into a hole?’
‘You’re too late, mate.’
‘Bleak this place isn’t it?’ Harris said. ‘Reminds me of the place where I grew up.’
London lad Jack Harris grew up in Bermondsey and spoke like he had, but hated anyone reminding him of it by mocking his accent. Not the most handsome man in the drugs squad, with cropped short hair, a round, podgy face, dark swarthy skin betraying his Greek ancestry and a dark beard shadow that a sharp razor couldn’t remove. He wasn’t the ugliest either, especially now with a large part of his features hidden behind expensive aviator sunglasses.
This part of Tottenham looked bleak to Emma, another London sink estate full of litter, spray-painted lock-up garages, multi-ethnic children and adults with a drug- or alcohol-induced vacant look in their eyes. It sure didn’t look like the place where she grew up, Lincoln, with its beautiful cathedral, mews alleyways and acres of parks. With fifteen years of working in London under her belt, she didn’t miss her home town and had no intention of moving anywhere else, especially now living with Matt Flynn.
Detective Inspector Emma Davis and Detective Sergeant Jack Harris were working in tandem with a mobile Armed Response Unit (ARU), searching for a big-time drug dealer that Emma’s boss had been chasing for years, long before Emma joined the department.
It was often said that British bobbies weren’t armed. In other parts of the UK, this was the case, but in London, due to its size and the diversity of the populace, many officers routinely carried guns. The mobile ARU with them, one of thirty such units operating in the Capital at any one time, was permanently armed.
The Met’s plan was to have an ARU on site, anywhere in London, to situations where it was believed perpetrators were carrying weapons or undertaking a serious crime, within seven minutes of the call. Jerome Powers, the man they were seeking today, had a reputation for using guns, and so the call for the addition of an ARU made sense, but also Emma and Jacko were armed.
A few minutes later they drove past White Hart Lane, home of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, and any minute now Harris, an avowed Gooner, would sound off. She counted the seconds, 5-4-3...
‘Beat them 3-1 last time,’ he said with enthusiasm, ‘not just a beatin’ but complete humiliation. Never to be forgotten by a true Arsenal fan like myself for the way we dominated the whole game, from the first whistle to the last.’
‘Are you finished?’
‘I know you don’t like football, Em, but driving past their place is intimidating for someone like me.’
‘We might be passing it a few more times in the next hour, so can you–’
‘Victor Lima One, calling Bravo Four.’
‘Received. What’s happening Jimmy?’
‘Target spotted. Heading east on White Hart Lane.’
‘Follow target vehicle,’ Emma said, ‘but no blues and twos until I say so. Understood? We’re four or five minutes away.’
‘Right, sir. Received and understood.’
Jacko didn’t need telling, the engine roaring into life before Emma had pressed ‘End’ on the portable handset. Both vehicles being used today were unmarked with police insignia but loaded with all the equipment of a regular police car. In addition to the weaponry, this included an ANPR unit, radio, siren and flashing lights. The anonymity of these vehicles allowed them and the boys in the ARU to follow a target vehicle without the occupants becoming alarmed.
Jacko could drive better than anyone else in the unit, one of the reasons she liked working with him, and he made easy meat of the light lunchtime traffic. In the time it took them to catch up with the ARU, the target had driven down Love Lane to pick up an accomplice, the vehicle now filled with four male occupants.
They drove past Sainsbury’s on Northumberland Park, a road leading into an industrial estate, and if the target Nissan carried on driving into the estate, Emma decided she would make the ‘hard stop’ there. Streets would be quiet, everyone working inside the commercial units, and the officers wouldn’t be eyeballed by a group of nosey parkers all reaching for their camera phones and putting pictures on social media.
She relayed her thinking to the two officers in the other car and they acknowledged. She’d worked with Jimmy and Eddie in the past and liked their no-nonsense approach. It was difficult for the people in the target vehicle to spot a following vehicle, never mind two police cars. Their vehicles resembled any other car in the street: dirty, scratched and with the paintwork fading. The four boys in the Nissan Sunny in front were laughing and joking and playing loud music as she could see their heads bobbing.
In London, it was easier following suspect cars than in many other cities. Roads were busy at all times: cars constantly turning off and joining, shoppers pulling in and out of parking places, tourists following satnav directions, and, inevitably, a car in front and a car behind, the price of living in a busy, vibrant city. It also meant if the occupants of the car realised they were being followed and tried to shake them off, the danger factor multiplied, with large numbers of pedestrians on pavements, roads lined with parked cars, and drivers turning into main roads without warning.
